Martin Luther King Jr. was a man of action. His famous “I Have a Dream” speech was delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom rally on August 28, 1963.

For a long time I’ve held the assumption that it is ideas that change things. I was wrong, people change things. Ideas are cheap, without action they have little value. It’s easy to romanticise the notion of ideas, but let’s get real. It’s the execution of an idea that people can then experience for themselves and make it their own that matters.

But before all of us designers start slitting our wrists and lamenting the very point of our existence let’s hold our horses. We do have a role to play. An architect of change needs to understand people. He/she needs to have emotional intelligence. To actualise an idea you need to be able to communicate, motivate and collaborate with others to take action. Designers need to be evangelists; their power is to create movement, to generate energy, to galvanize people behind their cause and to listen, not just talk.

Every form of design work is a pitch, its clarity and a declaration of purpose that sells on the worth of making whatever it is into something real. Any designer worth his/her salt has people that believe in them and their ideas. But the thing with ideas is that they never come fully formed. Being in a position to hold the belief of a team through the refinement, prototyping and testing of your design is crucial. However without belief and ultimately without trust you are dead in the water.

So let’s stop perpetuating the status quo and instead choose to change the world and innovate on whatever scale we can affect. Let’s forget mediocrity, ego and meeting after meeting. Let’s do something that has meaning, value and truth of purpose…now that feels better.